Category Archives: Defense Department

Defense Department, tech

iPod Touch, iPhone Break, iGo Ballistic

The Rat has a well-established level of techno-lust.  So it is a monument to his level of self control that he has not previously been the owner of an iPod Touch or iPhone. Well, either his self control, or the fact that he is invariably infuriated by their user interface.As a Crackberry user, the Rat prefers the tactile feedback of chicklets pressing under his…well, I guess for a lack of a better term, we’ll call them “fingertips”.  And in early testing, the cyberodent determined that trying to use the touch-sensitive screen of an iPhone or iPod Touch would drive him out of his fuzzy mind.

His wife and eldest ratling, however, have been iPhonatics  since early on.  His wife purchased (thankfully) a reconditioned first-generation iPhone some time ago, and his son, sporting hot fresh cash from a lucrative summer job, begged incessantly for weeks before Mrs. Rat went and stood in the hour-long line at the local Apple Store to procure him one of the second generation iPhones a few months ago. That left his less-than-year-old iPod Touch–with some heavy wear–up for grabs.

 So, Ratling Number 1 re-gifted it to his father as a birthday/late Father’s day/early Christmas present. The whiskered one has found it ideal for stealthily checking his email from the living room while allegedly listening to books on tape. 

Naturally, just a few days later, the eldest offspring dropped his iPhone, and cracked its screen.  A quick call to Apple confirmed that it would cost $250 to repair the phone, which was more than the AT&T “subsidized” price it was originally purchased for.  So, now the Rat is spending his spare time watching iPhone repair videos and tracking down a replacement iPhone 3G glass front.  Unless someone would like to make a donation…

“And would you believe the Army is interested in iPhones?” the cyberodent whined.  “Sure, they have nice high-rez graphics. But they aren’t exactly what I’d call military-grade ruggedized.”

Ironically, Apple–which has hardly ever been known for its close relationship with the military, despite a loyal Mac following in the Army–now finds itself in the odd position of being in the munitions business.  As the New York Times’ Ashlee Vance reports, PA Semi– the ARM processor manufacturer that Apple purchased and now has tasked with developing new iPod processors– is also now on tap to provide similar processors for missiles, avionics and sensors for defense applications.

“So maybe soon you’ll be able to buy a Predator flight control system through the Apple Apps Store,” the Rat told his sulking son.  “Just don’t drop your phone while flying it.”   

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Defense Department, Other Federal Agencies

The “best and brightest” are avoiding government service, says NY Times

The Rat has apparently joined a growing movement in government by departing from his years of service: the brain drain. And according to the NY Times, new brains aren’t coming in to replace the old ones because of the draw of places like Google.

A survey quoted in the Times article by Phillip Taubman, on the front page of the dead-tree edition, cited a 2007 M.I.T survey of students that found that very few systems engineering students were headed into defense or government positions– “28.7 percent of undergraduates were headed for work in finance, 13.7 in management consulting and just 7.5 percent in aerospace and defense. The top 10 employers included McKinsey, Google, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers, Bain, JPMorgan and Oracle — but not a single military contractor or government office.”

There’s a simple reason for the lack of interest, really: money. The survey showed that the average annual starting salary in finance and high-tech was more than $70,000, compared with $37,000 at the Defense Department,” Taubman wrote.

Combined with the waves of retirement over the past few years, that means that the government–and especially the DOD–has been unable to replace the rapidly evaporating braintrust that handled things like, for example, contract oversight–resulting in things like the Air Force’s tanker contract woes. Folks the Rat has talked with point to the brain drain as being responsible for more and more of the process management on contracts being handed over to the contractors themselves–which is like putting, if you’ll pardon the rodent pejorative, like putting squirrels in charge of counting nuts. (And apparently, according to Defense Systems’ Forward Observer blog, analysts think so too.)

So far, the solutions discussed by government officials aren’t exactly raking in the new braintrust. Becoming an “employer of choice” for Gen Y, as they’re constantly called, is going to take a lot more than making sure current employees are happy ambassadors of workplace joy, or making sure that they can surf Facebook and YouTube from work. The hiring process, which director of the Office of Personnel Management, Kay Coles James admitted in a 2002 interview was actually driving applicants away because of its complexity and length, hasn’t really improved all that much. And to be blunt, the attraction of working on the kinds of interesting problems government folks get to work on is probably not strong enough to draw someone away from an employer offering twice the money AND cool toys.

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